What Marvel Studios has achieved with the MCU is nothing short of incredible. Rival studios have tried and failed to replicate that success (look at Universal's ill-fated Dark Universe) and moviegoers now expect every franchise to link up and build to...something.
From day one, there's been speculation about who DC Studios will choose as the DCU's big bad. Darkseid is likely off the table after Zack Snyder's Justice League, but James Gunn must surely have plans for the team assembling for a battle with a seemingly unstoppable threat, right?
Much has been said about that possibly being The Centre, a monstrous being first introduced in Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier.
However, the DC Studios boss has now confirmed that the DCU isn't setting out to tell one big story that leads to a final boss-type villain in a future crossover or event movie.
"These are interconnected stories but people are always going to be [saying], 'Who's the big bad?' Are there big bads for connected films? Yes. But is this all about, 'Hey, I'm telling this one story about this big bad'? No," Gunn told Josh Horowitz. "This is about a connected universe. We're world-building. We're not story-building."
"We're not writing one story that has a beginning, middle, and end," the filmmaker continued. "We're creating a universe where people in which can go and join in and experience it. It is much more like Star Wars."
Some fans might be disappointed by these comments but is it really such a bad thing for the DCU to differentiate itself from the MCU in this way?
The Justice League is bound to assemble somewhere down the line and the villain they face doesn't necessarily need to have made their presence felt in countless other movies and TV shows beforehand. As for The Circle, we still expect that baddie to factor into Lanterns somehow.
That worked with Thanos but not Kang the Conqueror; Avengers: Age of Ultron also did just fine introducing Ultron without him having been teased for two or three years beforehand (it's also no secret that Gunn wasn't the biggest fan of having to write Thanos into 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy).
"The goal from the beginning was to give the honor that the great characters deserved; the Wonder Womans, Batmans, and Supermans," Gunn says of his DCU plans elsewhere in the interview. "But then also to prop up these lesser-known characters like Peacemaker, Booster Gold, and The Huntress."
You can watch the full interview with the filmmaker below.